The Bookseller

· Another week, another Da Vinci Code milestone. It is now a year since Dan Brown's page-turner first hit the top of the UK bestseller charts, with a weekly sale of 26,500 copies. But it was number one for only a week, and sales slid downward through the spring. Publisher Transworld feared it could disappear: were British readers ready for this breathless American quest thriller? But with the summer, the word of mouth surge started - helped by Transworld's "Just Read It" ad campaign and unavoidable bookshop displays. By September, The Da Vinci Code was back at number one - and has only been displaced four times since.

Some 5m people across the UK and Commonwealth have been drawn by its escapist appeal and promise of the "real story" behind the façade of Christian history. As Jason Cowley wrote in the New Statesman, "With its pseudo-scholarship, religious zeal and conspiracy theories, The Da Vinci Code occupies the ambiguous space of all our 'if onlys' while offering us its own stairway to heaven." It has also proved the maxim that all publicity is good publicity: January's Channel 4 documentary pushed sales back up to 90,000 copies a week, despite presenter Tony Robinson's conclusion that Brown has recycled a discredited conspiracy theory. When the Vatican appointed Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to rebut Brown's "shameful and unfounded errors", sales surged again. As the marketing director of rival publisher HarperCollins jokes: "Just when we thought we could plan how to get one of our authors to number one, the Catholic Church gets on the Da Vinci marketing team." Can anyone or anything stop it?

· If you can't beat the Code, join it. Most readers finish the book with a desire to know more: they turn first to Brown's earlier books, then to some of the 70-plus Da Vinci spin-offs or guides, and then - the theory runs - to other similar novels. The biggest is Rule of Four, by Ian Caldwell Dustin Thomason, which has already surpassed the 100,000 copy mark, and will be followed by The Real Rule of Four, a guide to the mystical 15th-century text The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. This summer will see a glut of mystery thrillers with eerily familiar marketing campaigns and jacket designs. The most promising is archeologist David Gibbin's Atlantis (Headline, July), about the underwater discovery of the lost city - inevitably, it claims to be based on fact.

· Despite the mass market dominance of the Americans, translated fiction is no longer the black sheep of the bookshop. One of this year's biggest sellers has been Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafon's Shadow of the Wind (a Richard & Judy Book Club pick); cult Japanese author Haruki Murakami has spent four weeks in the top 10 with Kafka on the Shore; and crime writers Henning Mankell and Boris Akunin have cemented their reputations. Readers seem to be opening up to writing from across the world, as long as it is not worthily packaged as a "translated literary masterpiece".

· New sports book publisher Vision played a but crucial role in Wales's rugby Six Nations triumph. Before the crunch match with Ireland, the Welsh team was presented with proof copies of Breathing Fire, Vision's behind-the-scenes story of the Six Nations campaign. The team asked for inspiring images from the book to be posted up on their changing-room walls; the rest is Grand Slam history. Vision has added an extra 32 pages to cover the victory, and will rush-publish by May 23.